The following relates to printing platforms. It finds particular application to printing platforms employing a multi-development system low-cost-per-page print engine having at least two different toners.
In conventional xerography, an electrostatic latent image is created on the surface of a photoconducting insulator and subsequently transferred to a final receiving substrate or medium. This typically involves the following. An electrostatic charge is deposited on the photoreceptor surface (e.g., by a corona discharge). The photoreceptor is exposed, which selectively dissipates the surface charge in the exposed regions and creates a latent image in the form of an electrostatic charge pattern. The image is developed by transferring electrostatically charged toner particles to the photoreceptor surface. The toner particles are then transferred to a receiving substrate or to one or more intermediate transfer elements and then to the receiving substrate. The transferred image is made permanent by various techniques, including pressure, heat, radiation, solvent, or some combination thereof.
With conventional systems, a print job that includes both color and black pages typically is processed using a color engine, wherein color toner is used to process the color pages and black toner is used to process black pages. This results in consistency of the black portions of the transferred images between the color and the black and white pages. However, using the black toner from a color engine to process a black and white page may be inefficient in that color engines typically are relatively slower than monochrome black toner engines and more costly on a per page basis. With conventional systems having both color and black engines, matching the black from the color engine with the black from the black engine may not possible since the black toner used with color engines typically is a glossy black, while the black toner used with black engines typically is a flat black. Thus, using such engines for processing the same print job may render pages with visually different looking black.